Author: CCW

“Rejoice with me”

Repentance leads to joy. There is something powerful in that idea. It is splendidly illustrated for us in the second lesson this morning in the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

Repentance is redire ad principium, a kind of circling back to the truth from which we have turned. The idea of turning back to the truth in the awareness of the ways in which we so easily turn away from it, is one of the recurring lessons of the Scriptures. It is an important part of the good news, the good news that results in rejoicing actually.

Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom of Jesu Ben Sirach, is one of the Books of the Apocrypha. It belongs to an ancient tradition of “wisdom literature” and, indeed, offers many a profound instruction on moral and spiritual ideas. In this morning’s first lesson, we are reminded about the destructive effects of anger and wrath. They are “abominations.” They are possessed by the sinful man and woman and they possess us. The desire for vengeance arises from anger and wrath and is set in explicit opposition to the idea and concept of forgiveness and healing. Ecclesiasticus would recall us to the commandments of God, to their positive force for the good that redeems us from our rage to lash out and destroy.

These are profound lessons and show something of the wisdom of the wisdom literature and how important a place they have in the reading and thinking life of the Church. In many ways, the Books of the Apocrypha, books written between the time of the writing down of the Old Testament and the emergence of the New Testament, anticipate some of the central themes of the Christian Gospel, especially in terms of moral instruction. In this case, the themes of forgiveness and joy are juxtaposed with the destructive forces of anger and wrath.

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“If I may but touch the hem of his garment, I shall be whole”

The year runs out in the themes of compassion and healing. This morning’s gospel provides us with a most poignant and touching scene of healing, a picture of human redemption in its fullness. What is it about? Simply, the radical meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. Next Sunday is the Sunday Next Before Advent. We stand at the end of the Christian year and contemplate the radical meaning of Christ’s turning to us but only so as to begin again. Such is his Advent. In his turning to us, we find healing and wholeness, but only, too, if we are turned to him.

It is a double healing story. The healing of the woman with a long-standing ailment of an issue of blood is a scene within a scene. It captures, in a way, the entire gospel. To steal a cure from him is to be unaware of who Jesus truly is. It shows an incomplete understanding of the divinity and the uniqueness of Christ. And yet what we most want, healing for a broken world and for our own broken selves, is found precisely in the one whom we ignore or deny.

There are, of course, the social implications of the gospel itself. Christ has come into our midst, into the heart of darkness, as it were, to bring light and grace and salvation and that puts real demands and responsibilities upon us who have heard his word. “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me,” Jesus says, for that is crucial to the idea of Revelation and to the nature of the Redemption of our humanity. But he also says “or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” Good works are done in faith, implicitly or explicitly. Yet they have their fullest meaning in the name of the one in whose name they are done. Sometimes deeds and actions speak louder than words, to be sure, but they have their radical meaning in the Word made flesh.

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“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends”

Remembrance Sunday ushers us into a week of remembrance culminating in Remembrance Day. Its significance should not be lost on any of us. And yet, how hard it is to remember! In that difficulty, though, we contemplate an important feature of our humanity, namely, the limits of our knowing and our being.

The leaves lie scattered on the wind and the rain. Who can count the leaves? Who can count the dead? Who can name them? November is the grey month of remembering. What does it mean to remember?

To remember is to realize who we really are. That means, paradoxically, to pay attention to others.

Remembrance Day itself is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of the redeemed community of our humanity. The golden thread of the life of Christ in the Saints runs through the common grave of our mortality. The intention of Remembrance Day in the secular aspect of our culture is to remember those who died for the sake of our social and political freedoms and life.

To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our remembrance is not religious. It is, and profoundly so. It reminds us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian, principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray; some would say collapse because those principles no longer seem to animate our souls and our institutions. Such is a kind of forgetting. Our November remembrances signal, perhaps, a kind of return. To remember the fallen is to honour what they fought and died for in far away places and in scenes of absolute horror, far beyond our imaging, despite the efforts of the film industry and even the purple prose of preachers.

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“Whose is this image and superscription?”

What’s this? Can it be that we are defined and governed by money? Does everything come down to money? “Money makes the world go round, of that we all are sure,” as the chorus sings in Cabaret. Is the “cabaret of life, old chum,” simply the cash nexus as Thomas Carlyle first suggested and Karl Marx famously claimed? And if so, what does that make us?

Money, it is proverbially and scripturally said, is “the root of all evil.” Why? Because money is power. The misuse of money is the abuse of power. Money is twisted around from being a medium of exchange to becoming a form of domination and control. There is, at once, the use of money to dominate and manipulate others; but there is, as well, the fact that money comes to dominate us.

It causes us to forget who we are. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than in our own world and day. Whether we are rich or poor, employed or unemployed, pensioned or unpensioned, we are constantly beseiged by images that persuade us that we are essentially economic beings, that our worth and the meaning of our lives is to be measured materially and financially. This is not only destructive of human personality and the human community but also of the forms of honest and meaningful exchange so necessary to the welfare of souls and communities. Their end, our end, “is destruction, whose god is their belly.”

Money comes to possess us because we allow it to define the way in which we live out our lives. Means become ends which they cannot be. Economic ends must always fail us for the simple reason that our lives and the worth of our lives cannot be reduced to an economic quantity. When we are defined economically, then, we are but “bellies,” as it were, mere consumers, and, no doubt, “bellyachers” too! We are seduced into thinking that everything, including God and religion, must be a consumer product, a marketable commodity. The evil of money lies precisely in making us forget who we are.

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